Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi will seek to make shark’s fin soup out of Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan at the Anchorage summit
By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times.
Leviathan seems to be positioning itself for a geopolitical Kill Bill rampage – yet brandishing a rusty samurai high-carbon-steel sword.
Predictably, US deep state masters have not factored in that they could eventually be neutralized by a geopolitical Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.
In a searing, concise essay, Alastair Crooke pointed to the heart of the matter. These are the two key insights – including a nifty Orwellian allusion:
1. “Once control over the justifying myth of America was lost, the mask was off.”
2. “The US thinks to lead the maritime and rimland powers in imposing a searing psychological, technological and economic defeat on the Russia-China-Iran alliance. In the past, the outcome might have been predictable. This time Eurasia may very well stand solid against a weakened Oceania (and a faint-hearted Europe).”
And that brings us to two interconnected summits: the Quad and the China-US 2+2 in Alaska.
The virtual Quad last Friday came and went like a drifting cloud. When you had India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying the Quad is “a force for global good,” no wonder rows of eyebrows across the Global South were raised.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi remarked last year that the Quad was part of a drive to create an “Asian NATO.”
It is. But the hegemon, lording over India, Japan and Australia, mustn’t spell it out. Thus the vague rhetoric about “free and open Indo-Pacific,” “democratic values,” “territorial integrity” – all code to characterize containment of China, especially in the South China Sea.
The exceptionalist wet dream – routinely expressed in US Thinktankland – is to position an array of missiles in the first island chain, pointing towards China like a weaponized porcupine. Beijing is very much aware of it.
Apart from a meek joint statement, the Quad promised to deliver 1 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines throughout the “Indo-Pacific” by the end of… 2022.
The vaccine would be produced by India and financed by the US and Japan, with the logistics of distribution coming from Australia.
That was predictably billed as “countering China’s influence in the region.” Too little, too late. The bottom line is: The hegemon is furious because China’s vaccine diplomacy is a huge success – not only across Asia but all across the Global South.
This ain’t no ‘strategic dialogue’
US Secretary of State Tony Blinken is a mere apparatchik who was an enthusiastic cheerleader for shock and awe against Iraq 18 years ago, in 2003. At the time he was staff director for the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by Senator Joe Biden.
Now Blinken is running US foreign policy for a senile cardboard entity who mutters, live, on camera, “I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Nance” – as in Nancy Pelosi; and who characterizes the Russian president as “a killer,” “without a soul,” who will “pay a price.”
Paraphrasing Pulp Fiction: “Diplomacy’s dead, baby. Diplomacy’s dead.”
With that in mind, there’s little doubt that the formidable Yang Jiechi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, side by side with Foreign Minister Wang Yi, will make shark’s fin soup out of their interlocutors Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the 2+2 summit in Anchorage, Alaska.
Only two days before the start of the Two Sessions in Beijing, Blinken proclaimed that China is the “biggest geopolitical challenge of the 21st century.”
According to Blinken, China is the “only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system – all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.”
So Blinken tacitly admits what really matters is how the world works “the way we want it to” – “we” being the hegemon, which made those rules in the first place. And those rules serve the interests and reflect the values of the American people. As in: It’s our way or the highway.
Blinken could be excused because he’s just a wide-eyed novice on the big stage. But it gets way more embarrassing.
Here’s his foreign policy in a nutshell (“his” because the hologram at the White House needs 24/7 instructions in his earpiece to even know what time it is):
Sanctions, sanctions everywhere; Cold War 2.0 against Russia and “killer” Putin; China guilty of “genocide” in Xinjiang; a notorious apartheid state getting a free pass to do anything; Iran must blink first or there’s no return to the JCPOA; Random Guaido recognized as President of Venezuela, with regime change still the priority.
There’s a curious kabuki in play here. Following the proverbial revolving door logic in DC, before literally crossing the street to have full access to the White House, Blinken was a founding partner of WestExec Advisors, whose main line of business is to offer “geopolitical and policy expertise” to American multinationals, the overwhelming majority of which are interested in – where else – China.
So Alaska might point to some measure of trade-off on trade. The problem, though, seems insurmountable. Beijing does not want to eschew the profitable American market, while for Washington expansion of Chinese technology across the West is anathema.
Blinken himself pre-empted Alaska, saying this is no “strategic dialogue.” So we’re back to bolstering the Indo-Pacific racket; recriminations about the “loss of freedom” in Hong Kong – whose role of US/UK Fifth Column is now definitely over; Tibet; and the “invasion” of Taiwan, now on spin overdrive, with the Pentagon stating it is “probable” before 2027.
“Strategic dialogue” it ain’t.
A junkie on a bum trip
Wang Yi, at a press conference linked to the 13th National People’s Congress and the announcement of the next Five-Year Plan, said: “We will set an example of strategic mutual trust, by firmly supporting each other in upholding core and major interests, jointly opposing ‘color revolution’ and countering disinformation, and safeguarding national sovereignty and political security.”
That’s a sharp contrast with the post-truth “highly likely” school of spin privileged by (failed) Russiagate peddlers and assorted Sinophobes.
Top Chinese scholar Wang Jisi, who used to be close to the late Ezra Vogel, author of arguably the best Deng Xiaoping biography in English, has introduced an extra measure of sanity, recalling Vogel’s emphasis on the necessity of US and East Asia understanding each other’s culture.
According to Wang Jisi, “In my own experiences, I find one difference between the two countries most illuminating. We in China like the idea of “seeking common ground while reserving our differences.” We state that the common interests between our two countries far exceed our differences. We define common ground by a set of principles like mutual respect and cooperation. Americans, in contrast, tend to focus on hard issues like tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea. It looks that the Chinese want to set up principles before trying to solve specific problems, but the Americans are eager to deal with problems before they are ready to improve the relationship.”
The real problem is that the hegemon seems congenitally incapable of trying to understand the Other. It always harks back to that notorious formulation by Zbigniew Brzezinski, with trademark imperial arrogance, in his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard:
“To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
Dr Zbig was referring, of course, to Eurasia. “Security dependence among vassals” applied mostly to Germany and Japan, key hubs in the Rimland. “Tributaries pliant and protected” applied mostly to the Middle East.
And crucially, “keep the barbarians from coming together” applied to Russia, China and Iran. That was Pax Americana in a nutshell. And that’s what’s totally unraveling now.
Hence the Kill Bill logic. It goes back a long way. Less than two months after the collapse of the USSR, the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance preached total global dominance and, following Dr Zbig, the absolute imperative of preventing the emergence of any future peer competitor.
Especially Russia, defined as “the only power in the world with the capacity of destroying the United States.”
Then, in 2002, at the start of the “axis of evil” era, came the full spectrum dominance doctrine as the bedrock of the US National Security Strategy. Domination, domination everywhere: terrestrial, aerial, maritime, subterranean, cosmic, psychological, biological, cyber-technological.
And, not by accident, the Indo-Pacific strategy – which guides the Quad – is all about “how to maintain US strategic primacy.”
This mindset is what enables US Think Tankland to formulate risible “analyses” in which the only “win” for the US imperatively requires a failed Chinese “regime.”
After all, Leviathan is congenitally incapable of accepting a “win-win”; it only runs on “zero-sum,” based on divide and rule.
And that’s what’s leading the Russia-China strategic partnership to progressively establish a wide-ranging, comprehensive security environment, spanning everything from high-tech weaponry to banking and finance, energy supplies and the flow of information.
To evoke yet another pop culture gem, a discombobulated Leviathan now is like Caroline, the junkie depicted in Lou Reed’s Berlin:
But she’s not afraid to die / All of her friends call her Alaska / When she takes speed / They laugh and ask her / What is in her mind / What is in her mind / She put her fist through the window pane / It was such a / funny feeling / It’s so cold / in Alaska.
Pepe does get to the essential detail so clearly. Commonality verses divide all and conquer all. When he says it goes back a long way he is surely right again.
“To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
“To keep the barbarians from coming together” This is so telling with regard to the little noticed reality that the Roman Empire never truly collapsed. Its patriarchal method of class rule, wherein an externally imposed force imposes a unity of subjugation on all peoples (symbolized by the fasces) with its iron rings that hold all peoples within its steely grip – is still the dominant ideology of governance in the West. The collapse of Capitalist America is nothing less than the real and final collapse of the ideology of Roman rule. It has been so long coming that the Western mind has to stretch deeply into history to see it for what it is. It was Peter Ustinov who said that Americans make the best movies about the Roman Empire. Because they share the same excesses along with similar bad taste. There is a reason that Washington DC has a Cato institute. Rome never had an ideology of commonality. It had a religion of anti-commonality in governance.
Now all it has left is a very old propaganda display that cannot hide its own sunset. As the dog finally faces its death its plaintive barking becomes ever more shrill and detached from reality.
The Saker always says that the West is not the Romans, but rather the Franks. I would like to know what we have in common with the Franks, because America always seemed very Roman to me.
Perhaps only our leaders or their system are like the Franks.
Both the Romans and the Franks have been influential in the making of the West. In my understanding the Romans even more so. Their influence is far deeper, more broad based and longer lasting. As I see it the Franks picked up the remains of the Roman heritage and created their own little empire with it. Charlemagne did get crowned in Rome after all. So we can hardly overlook the symbolism of that. There is a powerful hidden continuity between ancient Rome and the Franks. You might call it the Roman Catholic version of Christianity. For the first thousand years of Christianity that religion was poisoned by the Roman ideology of religious domination for class supremicist purposes. But that is not all. The Romans created our modern concept of individuality, legislative law and the arts of patriarchal governance. The Romans taught the West its theory of governance. There has never been a decisive break from that on the level of consciousness. All of which continued to develop and influence later Europe long after their empire physically perished. The Roman Empire lives on in the attitude of the ruling class to governance and social control. You might say the Franks did their best to ape the ancient Romans.
The founders of American liberty were serious students of the classics and did their best to assimilate the wisdom of the ancient Romans in the construction of America. The American founders were intensely interested in how the Romans viewed issued of political liberty, republicanism and despotism. This all carried over into the creation of patriarchal American class power. Just look at the architecture. The Romans were seriously into Egypt and Washington has a Cleopatra’s Needle. The terms and forms are so contiguous. The Romans had a Senate. America has a Senate. The follow through is so clearly visible.
“The exceptionalist wet dream – routinely expressed in US Thinktankland – is to position an array of missiles in the first island chain, pointing towards China like a weaponized porcupine. Beijing is very much aware of it.”
What a great way of putting it, Pepe. That dream has been around for a long, long time. Chosenness manifested itself in the racist ideology that claims Europeans were destined by God to displace indigenous people all around the world, rape them, pillage them, and in the case of the former American Confederacy, own them. This is exactly what the Ashkenazim are now doing in Palestine. Manifest Destiny equals Zionism equals racism. If you don’t believe me, just ask any Native American or any Palestinian.
We’ve already had an Asian NATO, sort of – SEATO which thankfully died in 1977. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia_Treaty_Organization
Something does not sit right regarding this Alaska meeting. My gut tells me there is something more to it than simple talks.
I suspect this is really a good old fashioned “war talk” – a procedure tried and tested over millenia and one very fitting for an ancient and traditional power such as China (also fits with the teachings of Sun Tzu).
Throughout history, powerful Kings / Generals / Nations who are at war – or on the brink of war – often exchanged terms of capitulation or surrender, or compromise or understanding, with other Kings / Generals / Messengers in order to avoid direct fighting (and the mass deaths and destruction on both sides any fighting would cause).
This was sometimes done on neutral ground – sometimes on the battle field (there are some very good movie depictions of this procedure, with perhaps 300 and Troy being the most well known, but there are many more).
I suspect that China and the US are on the brink of open conflict – if they have not already engaged in conflict (some people have sugeested the Chinese sponsored and ‘fixed’ the US elections and released of Covid19 out of Wuhan as assymetrical warfare moves against the US).
Clearly, when viewed with these optics the Alaska meeting is the opening meeting between ‘Kinks Messengers’ prior to taking each others ‘terms’ to the ‘Kings’ themselves.
Take your pick what this meeting is really about – Taiwan, South China Sea, Belt & Road, or my ‘best guess’ which is Iran.
I feel that Iran will be somewhere in these talks as China is effectively propping up the Iranian economy with purchases of oil (and is still moving into Iran to develop oil and gas fields).
China has also indicated they ae going to improve port facilities for tankers (which would also allow heavy warships – including a Chinese aircraft carrier – to dock. Neither the US or Israel would want to see any of this happen.
Perhaps the US seeks to make a deal with China to move away from Iran, perhaps in exchange for recognising Hong Kong as 100% part of China, perhaps promising not to sell or deploy any further weapons to Taiwan.
Perhaps it is actually China that now has the US by the proverbial balls through control of the current US administration and seeks to begin negotiations for something else.
I dont know what is really going, I am guessing, and I get the impression most geopolitical experts / analysts dont really know what is going on either.
Whatever is really going on one thing is clear – there is currently something very (VERY) big taking place on the geopolitical chessboard involving China, Russia, Iran, and the US (plus Israel, Turkey, Syria, the UK, Ukraine and Poland).
I think for now all any of us can do is keep watching and keep joining the dots in order to try and piece together a bigger picture.
Thanks, Mad King, for your thoughts. I think we can draw some boundaries around the unknowable events in Alaska.
It cannot be a negotiation. The US has nothing to offer. The Chinese look through time and see to the end state of current evolutions. For example, if a statue is falling, they see it already lying in rubble on the ground. So they would see no value in assisting the fall — it’s already a done deal. The American Empire is collapsing, why bestir yourself?
Further, the word of the US is worth nothing. Not only does its leadership have no truth (nor wisdom, nor integrity). But the current set of thieves can be replaced at any moment, with the new batch rejecting all commitments made by the earlier set.
I don’t think they need to know what the US elite are thinking. Our behavior may be incomprehensible to them, but they surely know everything being discussed in back rooms.
Thus they have no need for talking TO each other; but they may well be knowingly talking PAST each other. There is some value seen in appearing to talk to each other. It is a way to get a message out to some other audience.
Maybe the goal is to appear to be enemies. I am grasping at straws. But I think that whatever is going on is a sham in terms of what it appears to be.
” a sham”
For some evaluation is a function of purpose and perception of the purposes of others, all predicated on facility.
If any of these aspects are not present some assay of “talking past” is the outcome, as understood by those with perception of the purposes of others as a function of facility, and encouraged in furtherance of their purpose.
The evaluation of “sham” is a function of not-my-purposeness/expectation which is assigned prime significance inhibiting perception/acceptance of the purposes of others, thereby facilitating “talking past” and the grasping at straws by the would-like-to-be “evaluator”.
The evaluation of “enemies” assigns a counter-productive significance to the purposes of others thereby limiting options, including but not limited to, the partnership of opponents in their own transcendence.
“….whatever is going on is a sham in terms of what it appears to be.”
Perhaps I can suggest that what is going on is:
As a function of your purpose/expectation and perception of the purposes of others, all predicated on limited facility –
you attempt to bridge doubt by “belief/speculation” as a function of an aversion to doubt predicated on the illusion that everyone has and is entitled to their own opinion-
instead of accepting/embracing doubt and engaging in co-operative relations based upon from each according to her/his abilities, to each according to her/his needs , thereby conserving your “energy” and redirecting “focus” to matters in which you may have more enhanced facility?
.
The mad King Xiden.
You may not know what is going on as you said, but it’s pretty clear what is going on!
The US has reached a tipping point where they are reacting from impulse and are out of control. To have elected a Child Fondler and worse and then assemble a contingent of ex-Obama Murderers tells you the American Public believe in Clint Eastward still being able to destroy the Third Reich single handedly! And that’s what’s going on!
Unfortunately for them and their insatiable greedy demands, China and Russia have had enough and this meeting in Alaska will display they will go nowhere very fast! So watch the “Show” and reflect on what I’m saying.
And none of it is good other than to say thank Christ it’s about time!
William Kierath.
Thanks for your insights. For some years I have been thoroughly alarmed at the economic and social costs to the US related to the fentanyl drug catastrophe. The price tag for this horror in terms of bankrupted and ruined families and communities exceeds one trillion dollars. What does this mean for so many Americans? It means that the war has been, and still is, against us, and we have lost, terribly. If the US was wise, it would fix its own house, so to speak, and not lecture other countries about what they “should” do.
The problem with team Biden is that American “liberals” have lobotomized themselves with the Social Justice Ideology. The “Liberals” pride themselves on being anti-racist, anti sexist, anti Homophobic and anti Transphobia. team Biden has made it part of the “Universal” values and human rights.
They have declared all religions and cultures to be evil and should adopt American values. At this point they think in irrational terms and can barely use or understand logic. Soon the whole world will realize the US is fundamentally evil and the resistance will be extrem. Also the many hordes of Americans who do not share the liberals opinion of themselves, That is why there are 5,000 troops in Washington protecting Congress from the American people.
Pepe is right about the Chinese diplomats making fools of the Americans. If an American diplomat did anything but demand concessions on any point, the liberal pack would denounce as racist etc.
“In my own experiences, I find one difference between the two countries most illuminating. We in China like the idea of “seeking common ground while reserving our differences.” We state that the common interests between our two countries far exceed our differences. We define common ground by a set of principles like mutual respect and cooperation. Americans, in contrast, tend to focus on hard issues like tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea. It looks that the Chinese want to set up principles before trying to solve specific problems, but the Americans are eager to deal with problems before they are ready to improve the relationship.
‘Improve the relationship.’
for St. Paul that meant being a “servant to all” as a first 1 Cor. 9:19
“To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
their was a Roman Centurion who learned an important lesson:
from an inscription on a stone tablet found in North Africa…
“I the captain of a Legion of Rome have learned and pondered this truth. In life there are but two things love and power and no man can have both.”
and the words of a true strategist:
Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold. Matt. 24:12
Strategic Primacy in the Time of Eurasia while falling to second place economically and militarily
Full Spectrum Dominance for a military who can’t dare a combat ground game on Eurasian soil, a military has a huge navy nullified by hypersonic missiles, air power that can’t fly over Russian or Chinese borders because of S-400s/S-500 (shortly), and Regional Commands that find themselves shut down electronically in Syria and the Black Sea whenever the Russians switch on the juice to their EW systems.
The US Hegemony is now solely financial. It’s hegemony rides on sanctions and helicopter money chasing the best short term returns, as it tries to stay ahead of the tens of Trillions of debt its Liberals create to hold off the tens of millions of jobless workers at home.
Symbolic is the moat of tens of thousands of National Guard and unscalable fencing with concertina wire as protective shield for the corruption proceeding in the “house of the people”, the Congressional Capitol.
The Dissonance of DC is readable in any language around the globe. 7.5 billion people see the US in descent and devolution.
China and Russia have the awesome responsibility to secure a landing place for the teetering and crumbling edifice once the sole SuperPower on Earth.
Leviathan indeed.
As Hobbes wrote in the 17th Century: “the kingdom of darkness… is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light.”
The confederacy of deceivers reigns.
In Alaska, Blinken wears two hats, one from the confederacy of deceivers, the other from the confederacy of dunces.
The wary Chinese are on guard to protect their interests and not to laugh.
“The US Hegemony is now solely…..”
In any interaction sole agency and hence hegemony and/or full spectrum dominance cannot exist, but the “belief” in sole agency and hence hegemony and/or full spectrum dominance can continue to exist by the half-lives of frames/ideologies as you illustrate, which are encouraged, but not only in attempts to extend the half-lives of ideologies.
Encouraging levels of immersion in ideologies through perceived lack of challenge encourages the opponents’ continued reliance on belief thereby limiting the perceptions and options available to opponents to the simplistic thereby facilitating their own transcendence.
“…..solely financial. It’s hegemony rides on…”
That is a commonly held but constantly diminishing “belief” by the opponents predicated in large assay on their perceived “success” in the early 1970’s in relation to removing the US dollar from the gold standard, increasing the usage of subsequent dollars in commodity trading including but not restricted to petro-dollars,and variable market derived exchange rates facilitated in part by the beliefs of others in the we-the-people-hold-these-truths-to-be-self-evidentness-that-markets-freeely-self-regulate.
In all interactive systems change is a constant whose variables include but are not limited to, trajectory and velocity.
However as a function of belief in a continuing positive answer to “Do you think your opponents are a stupid as you are?”, the opponents’ practices seek to continue to deny that “In all interactive systems change is a constant whose variables include but are not limited to, trajectory and velocity.
Hence it may appear that “The confederacy of deceivers reigns” whilst “The confederacy of would-like-to-be-deceivers-but-are-not-adept-enough are engaged in self-deception” facilitating the expanding trajectories and velocities of their own transcendence.
Such are among the utilities of hubris.
Joe Biden is continuing America’s hostility against China–not to mention its hostility against Russia, Iran, Venezuelan, Bolivia, etc.–just the same as his predecessor, Donald Trump.
US imperialism puts China in its sights
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/17/pers-m17.html
U.S. Aggressiveness Will Accelerate Its Demise
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/03/us-aggressiveness-will-accelerate-its-demise.html
So much for the propaganda that Joe Biden is any different from Donald Trump–or that Donald Trump is any different than Joe Biden.
Those fake “differences” are psyops peddled by both Red State Conservatives and Blue State Progressives in order to cover up the reality that there is 1–and only 1–political party in the USA: that of the American Empire and its war criminals.
The Red State Conservatives support the war criminal Donald Trump and the Republican faction of this American Empire.
The Blue State Progressives support the war criminal Joe Biden and the Democrat faction of this same American Empire.
A pox on both these political factions and their supporters.
As Biden admitted during his 2020 campaign in a speech to rich American fatcats: Nothing Would Fundamentally Change. This is true especially for American imperial/foreign policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=iBsS6hovWIU&feature=youtu.be
“After all, Leviathan is congenitally incapable of accepting a “win-win”; it only runs on “zero-sum,” based on divide and rule.”
This is what continues to puzzle me. The US repeatedly makes zero-sum choices that damage its interests far more than the nations they are supposedly gaining some advantage against.
Any nations and organizations applying win-win game theory will eventually create ever greater advantages against this self destructive choice making.
Because they’re ‘high on their own supply’ i.e. they’ve come to believe their own propaganda of being the world’s one indispensable nation !!!
The real reason is the MIC wants perpetual war “preparations” for their own economics and need potential targets that the public can comprehend.
911 staged collapse of three “steel” buildings hit by two small “aluminum” tubes allowed trillions to be spent on the other side of the world for 20 years for no gain but the public believed it all made “sense”.
they will repeat the formula sooner or later
You seem to assume that “The US … interests” are what would be optimized in game theory. It’s not how it works because the ruling elites are trying to optimize their own interests which simply do not coincide with the general interests of the US. They are predators, and the American people, are also being destroyed, just more slowly than people in the official victim states. BTW, it’s possible to date when an empire goes into decline. When the empire stops being an overall positive for the homeland population, and becomes a negative for them, then the empire has entered into its decline. The downward slope can happen when (1) the costs of wars to maintain the empire become greater than the economic profit of the colonies, or (2) from the incompetence or (3) massive greed of the ruling elite, or, from all three reasons. But the American Empire is a historical oddity because some of the actual ruling elite are not American, but British and Israeli. So that’s reason #4 why US interests are not prioritized.
Russia is not “the only power in the world with the capacity of destroying the United States.” The U$ is showing a far greater capacity for destroying itself.
In the fashionable inversion of reality vis-a-vis China the West, principally Britain,during the 19th century, seem to have forgotten about the Opium Wars (that’s Wars plural). First and Second opium wars.
”The British Empire was the largest drug pusher the world has ever seen. By the 1830s the smuggling of opium into China was a source of huge profits and these profits played a crucial role of financing the British rule in India and were underpinning British trade and commerce throughout the East. This is one of those little details that are often overlooked in general histories of the empire where the opium trade is generally played down and sometimes ignored altogether … The opium trade was clearly not a small scale affair carried out by small-time crooks and gangsters. Instead it was a massive international commerce carried out by major British trading companies under the armed protection of the British state.” (The Blood Never Dried – John Newsinger).
Now China must be destroyed. History repeats itself. The hypocrisy is breath-taking!
….and the follow-on empire, or is it still the same empire also carries on a massive international drugs trade ( Afghanistan, Columbia, etc ). It is also massively into paedophilia, child trafficking, slavery and every other debauched and satanic malfeasence. This racketeering, amoral cesspit is the source and cause of its own demise and will be unlamented….anywhere
Not long ago Australia insisted that an investigation into the Chinese Covid virus be undertaken and as the US indicated they must notify the Chinese of such.
They did.
Next the Chinese banned imports of all Australian wine, lobsters, fruits and other agricultural items that were making Australia a very strong surplus of trade with China. The largest export item iron ore from Western Australia was not on the list though it was mentioned.
Many primary producers in Australia were not impressed particularly the wine growers and bottlers when they heard the Chinese were going to replace their total Chinese sales with similar products from the wine growing South Africa. The South Africans were very happy.
The Chinese then made a bid for Australian gold mines.
Many Australians farmers are now very aware of what the US alliance has cost them particularly as they have a deficit balance with the purchase to the F35s from the US that appear, if converted, may make good busses for general transportation.
Such is the cost of being a US puppet. It will not last. Puppets in the White House and all over the world just waiting for someone with sharp scissors.
Hope we get updates by Pepe. Seems to be a crunch time.
The reason why Western culture embraces imperialism is because Western culture believes human existence is a zero-sum bargain. This, combined with a depraved nihilism, is the root of Western imperial thinking.
Lou Reed had some great lines, Pepe. This one I like in the current context:
“Stick a fork in them and turn ’em over. They’re done.”
Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan aren’t in the same category…unlike the other two, Tibet is an illegally occupied nation of non-Chinese people (who view the invading Chinese as genocidal monsters).
who are you to judge?
I’m a retired scholar with about thirty years of experience in this subject (as is usually the case in the Saker community vientito).
Tibet has historically been part of China. Perhaps you should suggest the US to give up the illegally occupied Hawaii. Read a little bit and educate yourself
When the Yanqui look in a mirror they see a shining hill or some nonsense, but what old Europe sees is a land of ignorant brutality and knuckle-dragging recidivism; it’s our own shameful face from 1780 looking back at us… slaves, barons, warts and all.
As for Hawaii, it was brazenly stolen from its inhabitants in 1898 by US Marines in the service of (organised crime style) corporate interests. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I’m a lifelong fan of US culture and music and I’ve studied Chinese philosophy for decades, so actually I’m critical of China and America for not holding true to their own amazing cultures. America isn’t American enough for my liking and China definitely isn’t Chinese enough.
I stand with my calculation that everything after Iran’s retaliation is just theater.
The U.S had come to terms. China had come to terms. No one is going to get Iranian or Russian oil for free.
Covid19 scam was agreed. Obviously Russia and even China will get some concessions to let the western economies climb down gently. Note that China and Iran played up the covid19 first.
I expect Russia will be provided a chance to take what it wants in Ukraine and a few other places. e.g: Anglos instigate ukies and stand back.
It is frustrating to watch all the drama waiting for the píeces to fall as arranged.
Winken, Blinken and Nod is unable to contemplate that the China-Russia Double Helix Train left the Station 🚉 long ago and that the’Barbarians’ have joined forces and don’t care if you sail your boats around the Indo-Pacific. They will be easy targets for our Hypersonic Missiles.
A particularly interesting article on the motives of the Leviathan.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/leviathan-mobilises-decisive-battle
“In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, contends that western élites are experiencing a collapse of authority deriving from a failure to distinguish between legitimate criticism and – what he terms – illegitimate rebellion. Once control over the justifying myth of America was lost, the mask was off. And the disparity between the myth and public experience of it became only too evident.”